May 14, 2018

Quantum, the leading secondary storage vendor, continues to change and adapt following the arrival of a new CEO a few months ago now. Brad Cohen who led the corporate communications for many years just left last friday. He joined the company 20 years ago. We don't know yet if other changes happen, we'll know soon as Quantum will participate to the next IT Press Tour end of June.

May 10, 2018

Velostrata, one of the few leading cloud migration companies, unveiled yesterday the intent to be acquired by Google, one of their partners. This is a superb move by Google with this cloud migration gem.

Velostrata, Israel-based company with 25 employees, helps users to swallow and migrate data and workloads from on-prem to cloud entities such AWS, Azure and GCP and for Google it means migration to GCP with probably very soon the stop of AWS and Azure support.

With $31.5 millions raised, we estimate the deal around $200-300M meaning a multiple between 6 and almost 10. This deal also illustrates the power of Isreali companies and people as the Google blog post was written by Eyal Manor, VP Engr at Google Cloud, small world...

Before Velostrata, Issy Ben-Shaul, CEO and co-founder, already did 2 exits with 2 companies he co-founded: in 2008 Wanova got acquired by VMware and in 2004 he sold Actona to Cisco.

Google finally picks the most recent company as Velostrata was founded in 2014, others such C3DNA was founded in 2013, CloudEndure in 2012, CloudVelox in 2010 and Zerto in 2009 but clearly the battle is on, who's next?

Velostrata is also a competitor of Avere, acquired by Microsoft early this year, as it decouples storage and compute on-prem with data in the cloud. We see also some companies jumping in this multi-cloud wave, there is more than 100 hundreds in that segment, trying to resist to the data gravitation towards giant cloud service providers. This multi cloud segment is a real opportunity but not for everyone and not with basic solutions, I predict that many players will disappear soon...

Companies

Year founded

Investments

Acq.

AWS

Azure

GCP

Others

C3DNA

2013

$2M

-

Y

Y

Y

Oracle Cloud,
IBM Cloud, CenturyLink,
NTT, OpenStack-based
Cloud

CloudEndure

2012

$18.2M

-

Y

Y

Y

Oracle Cloud

CloudVelox

2010

$33M

VMware (Feb. 2018)

Y

Y

-

-

Velostrata

2014

$31.5M

Google (pending)

Y

Y

Y

-

ZeRTO

2009

$130M

-

Y

Y

-

IBM Cloud

We'll learn more in June with the 27th IT Press Tour as Velostrata chose to join the tour several months ago. Great session in perspective.

May 7, 2018

Enterprise Strategy Group aka ESG, founded by Steve Duplessie, had to replace Jason Buffington following his departure for Veeam as a key member of the product strategy team.

And the news is that Christophe Bertrand who spent some time at various storage companies - Arcserve, DDN, Hitachi, Maxtor, Veritas and Legato - is the new member of the team replacing Jason. Good luck Christophe.

May 3, 2018

Kaseya, a leader in IT infrastructure management for MSP and mid-market enterprise, announced its merger with Unitrends, a key player in mid-range Backup/Recovery and BCDR. The idea is to extend the oem signed recently and provide a one stop shopping for IT management and data protection globally for the mid-market and MSPs. Unitrends will operate within Kaseya and keeps its brand well known by the market.

Also it's interesting to notice, again, that these 2 companies belong to the Insight Ventures Partners (IVP) investment portfolio. I wrote a note and a recent post illustrating that something is happening at IVP for data protection:

This is the second M&A activity this year between 2 IVP's companies, in January Veeam acquired NW2S,

and IVP globally has stake at Veeam, N2WS, Spanning, OwnBackup, Unitrends and Acronis.

We anticipate some other moves to build a new innovative player especially if things leverage Veeam. It will be interesting to follow closely this story.

April 17, 2018

SoftIron, an innovator in storage, founded in London in 2012, was a curiosity at recent NAB show. The company develops an interesting Ceph appliance optimized for enterprise workloads named HyperDrive.

The current product supports Ceph 10.2 and is much more than just a installation of software on standard hardware. The team designs a specific hardware with standard components to deliver the performance level needed by enterprise class customers. The result is an appliance with wire speed performance.

Also the company adopts a pay as you go subscription model aligned with cloud service provider and SaaS practices. Based on Ceph, the product exposes file, block and object interfaces with a 1U form factor and 48TB. A trial for 90 days is available.

SoftIron develops also a second product named HyperCast, a dense appliance dedicated to real time streaming.

April 12, 2018

Arcserve, leader in midrange data protection solution, continues to shake its leadership layer. Christophe Bertrand just left Arcserve after several years driving the product marketing effort. He joined Arcserve in 2013 following a few years at DDN, Hitachi, Maxtor, Veritas and Legato.

April 9, 2018

We just discovered a data archiving company Solar Archive based in the UK and founded early more than 15 years ago. Not very visible, the company develops a cloud-based email archive solution dedicate to managed service providers. This market target explains why the enterprise is a bit confidential or less seen by the public. The business model leverages oem with white label integrations.

The product supports various email environments such Office 365, Exchange, Lotus Domino… via SMTP or EWS/IMAP. Solar Archive servers collaborate in parallel for indexing an to guarantee availability. Following the indexing and other special tasks, the data is stored encrypted with strong access methods. Once the email is stored, the powerful searching mechanism helps users to access content in just a few seconds.

This is a segment pretty well occupied with Mimecast, Smarsh, Proofpoint, Veritas Technologies, ZL Technologies, Global Relay, Netmail, Sonian acquired last year by Barracuda Networks to name a few competitors.

April 3, 2018

HYCU Software is the new name of Comtrade Software, well know in the data protection landscape for its solutions for Nutanix and monitoring solutions for Citrix, F5 Networks and again Nutanix environments.

The company is led by Simon Taylor as CEO based in the HQ in Boston, he was CEO of the previous entity Comtrade Software and drove the growth of the company towards this change.

March 29, 2018

Infinidat, the alternative datacenter storage vendor, made a blast with the announcement of 4 new products:

InfiniSync provides a Zero RPO approach what we can name a true Continuous Data Protection mode. This is a new product coming from Axxana already covered multiple times (Jan. 2018 and French posts: Sept. 2008 before it officially launched, May 2009, Nov. 2009, July 2010 and Oct. 2011). It's a physical device with up to 36 hours battery life and various connectivity: ethernet, fibre channel and infiniband but also for degraded situation wifi and 4G LTE. It will be launched April 2nd.

InfiniGuard is also a data protection appliance but defined for a different usage. It's designed to boost restore and work with backup software and currently is certified with CommVault Simpana & HyperScale, Veritas NetBackup, Veeam Backup, IBM Spectrum Protect... The capacity starts at 500TB and can scale up to 20PB for 42U.

Neutrix Cloud is the cloud offering to expose file and block for applications running on GCP, Azure and AWS. The RPO is 4 seconds. it can also in standalone mode with on-premises InfiniBox. It will be also available on April 2nd.

InfiniBox F6212, classic offering from the company, but with a 8.3PB of capacity. Same availability in April.

The company is doing extremely well with 18th consecutive quarter of revenue growth and more than 3 EB deployed. They also belongs for the second time in the Storage Unicorn report having raised for $325M for a $1.6B valuation. Market facts confirm choices and strategy made by Infinidat leaders.

March 19, 2018

StorReduce just recruited Rick Gouveia as sales leader. Rick came from Datos IO and left the company following the acquisition by Rubrik a few weeks ago. StorReduce signed recently a partnership agreement with Western Digital for the ActiveScale product line.